Sandy Lewis and William Cohan’s lengthy NYT op-ed from Sunday is the best opinion piece I’ve read in the financial pages in a while. Lewis is a former Wall Streeter (convicted, no less) and Cohan is an editor at Fortune and the author of House of Cards. “We have both spent large chunks of our lives working on Wall Street,” they write, “absorbing its ethic and mores. We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over–and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March. But wishing for improvement and managing by the Dow’s swings are a fool’s game.”
They pose a series of questions that ought to be part of the everyday political dialogue–yet compared to the course of the Obama administration and the terms on which the press has covered it, their piece reads like an excerpt from Das Kapital.
I quote:
Six months ago, nobody believed that our banking system was well designed, functioning smoothly or properly regulated — so why then are we so desperately anxious to restore that model as the status quo?…
Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?…
Why is the morphine drip still in the veins of the financial system?…
Is there to be any limit on bailouts?…
Why isn’t the Obama administration working night and day to give the public a vastly increased amount of detailed information about what happens in financial markets?…
Why is the government still complicit in making the system ever less transparent, even when it comes to what should clearly be considered public information?…
Why hasn’t President Obama insisted on public hearings over what happened during this financial crisis?…
Why are we not looking to change our current civil and criminal racketeering statutes, which are playing a perverse role in investigations of the crisis?…
William Greider has part of the answer:
If not now, when? That question ought to haunt the Democratic Party and President Obama, who has been missing in action himself on key issues. Congressional Democrats are responding to this epic conflagration with the same risk-avoidance tactics they learned during many years in minority status. In those days, they could always blame right-wing Republicans for blocking their good intentions. But whom do the Dems blame now that they have the White House and fifty-nine votes in the Senate and a seventy-eight-seat majority in the House? Their standard explanation for not doing more is, “We didn’t have the votes.” So when might we expect Democrats to achieve more? When they have eighty votes in the Senate?
The party’s ideological intentions are being defined with greater clarity in these new circumstances, and so are the President’s. It’s still early, but the implications are ominous for other issues. If Democrats are reluctant to disturb the power of other major interests, it seems improbable that fundamental change will occur on healthcare, energy conversion or the restoration of work and wages. The problem now is the Democrats, not the Republicans. The party aids and protects its free-roaming entrepreneurial politicians and does not punish those who undermine the party’s larger promises. When Republicans were in charge, they enforced party loyalty with Stalinist discipline. Democrats are the party of safe incumbents, weak convictions.
